wife-beating question
wife-beating question noun: a question that presupposes some controversial premise, such that it cannot be directly answered without incriminating oneself or, at least, unintentionally conceding a point; a loaded question.
Noun
wife-beating question (plural wife-beating questions)
- A question that presupposes some controversial premise, such that it cannot be directly answered without incriminating oneself or, at least, unintentionally conceding a point; a loaded question.
- Mr. [Tony] Banks: When the Leader of the House sees his right hon. friend the Prime Minister, will he ask her to come to the Dispatch Box and condemn picket line violence by the police?
Mr. [John] Biffen: That is the most obvious and plain wife-beating question that I have ever heard asked.1984, British House of Commons debate, Hansard vol. 70, 20 Dec 1984 - Amis also recounts some aggressive questions allegedly put by him to me and to James Fenton in our (James's and my) Trotskyist years, when all three of us were colleagues at the New Statesman. The questions are so plainly wife-beating questions, and the answers so clearly intended to pacify the...2002 Sep, Christopher Hitchens, “Martin Amis: Lightness at Midnight”, in The Atlantic
- Mr. [Tony] Banks: When the Leader of the House sees his right hon. friend the Prime Minister, will he ask her to come to the Dispatch Box and condemn picket line violence by the police?
Forms of wife-beating question
| plural | wife-beating questions |
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Origin of wife-beating question
From wife-beating + question, with reference to the oft-cited example "Have you stopped beating your wife?".
Questions about wife-beating question
- What does wife-beating question mean?
- Wife-beating question means a question that presupposes some controversial premise, such that it cannot be directly answered without incriminating oneself or, at least, unintentionally conceding a point; a loaded question.
- What part of speech is wife-beating question?
- Wife-beating question is a noun.
- What is the plural of wife-beating question?
- The plural of wife-beating question is wife-beating questions.
Words near wife-beating question in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wife-beating question (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-wife-beating question.ogg.
Cite this entry: “wife-beating question.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wife-beating_question. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.